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Home >> Photography >> Digital Photography Adobe Lightroom 1.1 Adobe Lightroom (LR) has generated a lot of buzz in the photographic community. It has, in its relatively short life, become such a force that it has generated its own cottage community of third-party books, tutorials, and websites that pick it apart and show you the innards. If not on the same level and scale as its older cousin, Photoshop, it is still impressive support, but that’s what happens when your parent is Adobe with all of its industry muscle to bring it to life with immense support. It’s quite obvious that LR was announced somewhat prematurely as a way to counteract Apple’s own child, Aperture, which offers some similar features as LR, as well as a new way to think about RAW file conversion. LR went through a public beta development that allowed any number of users to download it for free and report back to Adobe their findings. I tried the beta version at least twice and both times very quickly uninstalled it because it just incredibly slow on my computers. When LR started shipping as a final 1.0 product, I tried that too, but didn’t find the speed much improved. I don’t know what’s happened between now and then, but LR 1.1 is finally providing stability and efficiency of operation. I still wouldn’t consider it blistering, but it’s not being hurt by comparisons to Bibble’s speed, and it is substantially faster than Nikon Capture.
My first go around with LR was like groping my way around a room without light (pun somewhat intended) and I posted some comments rather too quickly and in ignorance. So, after being a bit too presumptuous about LR, I decided to dig deeper into this highly regarded and highly raved about RAW converter. To help me along, I even bought the Luminous Landscape tutorial videos. Most of these tutorials are for the original LR 1.0 and are conducted by Michael Reichmann and Jeff Shewe, although there is a LR 1.1 update available for free as at this writing. The tutorials definitely helped to understand the enormous amount of power behind LR and how flexible the application can be to catalogue one’s digital files. However, tutorials are only the first step and the only real way to get know something is to use it. But, let me be honest, I haven’t watched all of the tutorials yet, because I’ve been under some time pressure to deliver completed files on discs to a client (now finally completed). Also, the tutorials are done by two photographers that don’t shoot events or weddings, so their perspective on LR won’t be the same as mine (they do shoot tons of images though, "gigage" as they've come to call it). I decided to reconvert all the RAW files from the recent wedding I shot a couple of weeks ago to introduce myself to LR. I would have had to reconvert some files anyway, although not all of them, as the bride indicated that she wanted to order prints from me, and I only work with TIFF or PSD files for printing. The original conversion via Bibble was to sRGB JPEGs with the intention that these would be her files to take wherever she wanted for printing. She had not mentioned anything about the possibility of wanting to order prints previously, so I was a bit surprised as I expected to deliver files only and be done with the job. Oh well, money is money. Before going further, let me just state these comments are of me still in the early stages of getting to know LR and opinions may change as I get to know it better. It most definitely is not an in-depth look at LR, as there other sources far more knowledgeable than I that you can refer to. So, for some of the readers that were looking forward to this article, my apologies in advance for producing a very basic look at LR. As I’ve said previously, LR is slick eye candy and the UI is pretty nice for the most part. At this point, my only major beef is that I find the batch processing capabilities to be bit lacking. I find Bibble’s and even Nikon Capture’s method of batching files with common settings to be more intuitive and straightfoward. Ah, speaking of Nikon Capture, I find it amusing that in the past, many Nikon using photographers bitched and whined about having to pay US $100 for this fairly powerful, albeit atrociously slow, RAW converter. Now we have LR and Apple’s Aperture selling for $300 and yet few whiners about the cost of these third-party applications. Of course, I do grant you that the $300 cost of LR (or the $130 for Bibble Pro) is a bargain to be able to retire the old (and crippled, as some would describe) warhorse of Nikon Capture and get some real workflow action happening. Nikon Capture is slow because it does not use sidecar files, instead it has to render each edit to the RAW file. There was also the old chestnut of Canon bundling their RAW converter free with its cameras, but it seems some photographers slept through basic economics. There’s always a cost to something, whether bundled like Canon does, or unbundled like Nikon does. If bundled, you still pay for it in the cost of the camera’s price. Also, until recently, few people ever talked about the Canon RAW converter. From my general perusing of the ‘net, pretty much every Canon using photographer used something other than the bundled software, such as Adobe Camera RAW or Capture One. There is apparently a reason for this, until recently (maybe the last two versions), the Canon software wasn’t worth the CD it came on. But, I digress… First thing to do is to import files into LR. Being well organized before you do this is a plus because LR will mimic your folder structure on the hard drive for your imported files. Just as with Bibble, LR uses sidecar files to store edits or instructions that will be applied during the actual RAW conversion. What I don't care for though is having the LR files stored on the C drive. I'd prefer to be able to move those files to a data drive, but I'm not familiar enough with LR as of yet to determine what I can and cannot do with LR's folders.
After importing all 1125 RAW files into the LR Library, I went to work using the application to “Develop” the files. At first, I worked on one image at a time to get used to the feel, but this got old pretty fast, especially as I was finding myself entering the same Sharpening settings for every image. After finishing off the first set of files of the bride getting ready for the ceremony, I tried to see how I could batch process the files with some common settings. As mentioned before, not the most intuitive and it seems that the LR engineers, while having given much thought to managing a huge number of files in the Library, such as a stock photographer would want, haven’t given as much consideration to say, wedding and event photographers who need fairly efficient workflow to edit a large number of files at once. Unlike the stock or other similar photographer, wedding and event photographers don’t cherry pick the one shot out of many for sending to an agency; we organize the files to tell a story of what unfolded during the wedding day and while we keep an eye on really excellent individual images, we (at least I am) are more concerned with the overall gestalt of the entire folder of images. With Bibble, I can highlight some or all of the thumbnails in a folder and then apply edits to the first image, which will instantly apply the same settings to all the other highlighted files. Very efficient and intuitive for handling a large number of files. With LR, I click on the files I want, which is the same as Bibble, but then I have to click on a Sync button and select which edits I want applied for all the files clicked. Then I adjust the settings, which should do the trick most times, but I don’t know if it’s me not knowing LR well enough yet or what, but sometimes, I seem to have to click on Sync and then Synchronize again to actually get the edits applied to all the files. I’m chalking it up to me being a chimp at the moment with LR. Working with my current computer, an older Xeon-based box with dual 3.4 GHz CPUs and 4 GB of RAM (32-bit XP Pro), Lightroom ran okay and once I had edited all the files and exported them out as 16-bit TIFFs, the conversion seemed pretty speedy. A folder of 628 files took about an hour to export out of LR. LR has hung on me twice in a full day of editing, requiring it to be closed and started again, which is better than Bibble’s stability on my computer converting the same files. While Nikon Capture is slow, the last version, 4.2, has been pretty stable and while earlier 4.x versions have crashed on occasion, I can’t recall 4.2 crashing on me. Unfortunately, a 628 export job would be an all nighter instead of merely taking an hour as with Lightroom. As a reader pointed out to me, LR does have a straightening tool and it’s pretty, ahem, straightforward to use. I mostly used the actual straightening tool to measure out a straight line rather than rotate the image by eye using the overlaid grid and mouse. The LR tool is just like the one in Photoshop, except that as soon you measure out a line the image will automatically crop to the original aspect ratio, or another one chosen by you, such as 4x5, 4x6, 8x10, etc. Pretty nice, but old hat for Bibble users.
Missing though is a lens distortion correction tool (unless I missed that one too) like Bibble has and which makes it very easy to correct the barrel distortion of some of the lenses I use during a shoot, such as the 17-55 and the 18-200 (only used from the balcony for the convenience of going wide to long). Bibble will not only correct the distortion but also has a box to click on for automatically cropping the image – the outer edges of the photo can become rounded as the plug-in corrects the distortion, which requires a crop to get back to a straight image again. If I’m right and LR is missing this editing option, you gotta figure that it will be in the next major release, as it now seems like a standard feature in third-party converters.
I’ll probably be considered a Philistine for writing this, but I have no shame in admitting that I used the Auto exposure feature of LR, but only as a base to adjust and tweak further, just as I click on the Perfectly Clear plug-in for Bibble, also as a starting basis for additional adjustments. I think in about 95% of the files, I made additional adjustments to the exposure to suit my own tastes. If I don’t like what Auto exposure did, I can double click on Tone beside it and get back to default camera settings. This is one nice thing about LR, double clicking most of the Develop headings will get you back to default or starting settings, in case you did something really wrong. There is also a detailed History section in the left side column to undo edits in the Develop stage. For general photographs, LR’s Auto exposure provided a good starting point for additional adjustments. However, for wedding photos, I found that Auto exposure tends to add too much contrast and is too conservative with highlight retention. This is a good point as any to point out that you always want to strive for the optimum exposure in-camera and not resort to the converter to fix exposure errors. Adjusting the setting post exposure, especially for opening up an image by increasing the compensation or brightness, will result in more noise showing up. However, as most know, you do not want to blow out the highlights, as my buddy Larry did a few times during the shoot, when he shot in manual mode. While he looked at the LCD, he seemed to have ignored the histogram view – to be fair to Larry, he’s a Canon guy, so he would not have known all the little control settings to change the LCD views. Lose the highlights and you’ll never recover them no matter how good a highlight recovery tool is in your RAW converter of choice.
LR, like Nikon Capture, tends to render highlights more gently and with less contrast than Bibble. On occasion, when working on files in Bibble, I’ll see some weird pink, green or blue highlights, which requires un-clicking Bibble’s Highlight Recovery tool to get rid of them. Having to un-click the Highlight Recovery tool is a minus, especially when trying to reduce the contrast between a white dress and a black tux.
I tend to like warm and bright images, which I think should make for easier printing by clients with an outside printer, but there can be too much of a good thing, so for many of the photos, I went with a custom white balance using as close to a neutral point as I could find in the image.
I’m not sure what the LR engineers consider as neutral, but I figure that if the three RGB percentage settings are as close to each other as possible, that’s likely neutral. One tip though, don’t white balance on a chunk of blown out highlight detail that has 100% for all three channels. Proper WB should be done on non- specular highlight detail – this comes from Thomas Knoll, original Photoshop developer, via the Lightroom tutorial I bought. Oh yes, LR uses percentage settings for WB, whereas Photoshop uses the traditional 0-255 settings to denote 8-bits of color depth. Speaking of specular and highlights, while I was working on the reception/dinner files, I noticed that at some point, I had to use the highlight recovery tool, the fill light tool and combinations of exposure and brightness consistently to reduce the excessive contrast I kept on seeing in the flash-lit photos. Then I realized that all of those photos were taken with the Nikon SB800 flash using its stock diffuser (the StoFen-like device). I had much less work to do with the photos taken with the Gary Fong Lightsphere II. The Lightsphere uses a large amount of flash power and I’ve not taken to using it for an entire wedding shoot because I don’t think my current rechargeable AAs are up to the challenge (2300 mAh), but I will definitely upgrade to as high a power rating available next time round (currently, 2900 mAh) for use with the SB800 and SD-8A battery packs. For sharpening, I set a common setting for all the wedding files of:
In looking over the converted TIFFs, they do look nice and sharp, but I think I may have overdone it, as doing any further sharpening to the files will result in them becoming “crunchy” looking. If you’re the type that likes to do three rounds of sharpening, such as for capture, edit, and output, you’ll need to play with the settings to tune for individual needs, meaning a lesser amount than what I had set above. On the plus side, all I need to do is just batch convert the TIFFs to sRGB JPEGs with no other edits needed – remember, for me, the clients get JPEG files, while I work with TIFFs for printing. Incidentally, I found that if I went over 75 and 1 pixel for sharpening, that the most of the images became too crispy crunchy for my liking.
As for noise reduction, it’s subtle and depending on what kind of ISO setting used, may not do much of anything for most regular exposures. For one grossly underexposed photo I had to try and save, using the noise reduction beyond 50 gave me a photo that looked more like a watercolor. If you already have Noise Ninja, Neat Image, or Noise Ware, don’t be uninstalling them as yet, because I think there’s a lot left to be desired in LR’s noise reduction capabilities. Incidentally, for the image I had to save, I got nothing usable out of LR, whether I set noise reduction in LR, or not, and applied Noise Ninja afterwards. The only usable image I could produce came from Bibble using the Noise Ninja plug-in.
Bibble images - Left image = no adjustments, Right image = Bibble's Noise Ninja plug-in using auto profile
I wanted to see how good the stacking feature in LR is, but I didn’t use it at all because I had already sorted and renamed the RAW files. In watching the tutorial, I can see that it does the basics of what I want, but it just doesn’t seem as sexy as how Aperture does stacking. However, better something than nothing, right? I tried out the Web Gallery function, and I like it better than the web gallery feature in Photoshop. More user friendly for being able to create custom headers or titles, although still not as flexible as I would want. What I want out of a good web gallery application is to be able to put in my own custom navigation, logo and/or graphic into every page without having to edit every page. Here’s a quickie gallery of photos I took during a May trip to Victoria. Exporting the web gallery files seemed to take quite a bit of time and I could hear my computer’s fan rev up and down, which seems to indicate pretty hefty resources being used. Checking the Windows Task Manager showed the CPU usage running from 60% to 100% in regular intervals while almost a gig was used by the Page File. The up and down CPU percentages coincided with the fans revving up and down. The web gallery feature creates three sets of files for small, medium and large. What I see is that depending on the browser size on the monitor, the gallery will use one of the three images that best fits the browser size and/or monitor resolution. And it does this on the fly, as you adjust the browser size, with just a quick little time bar to indicate that something is happening. Pretty nifty feature, this web gallery. I wish I could say the same for the slideshow feature. If I did not already use ProShow Gold to create slideshows, I might have considered LR’s slideshow feature as one of promise in the future, but also one that is buggy and unreliable at this point. Unfortunately, since I am a ProShow Gold user, I can only say that LR’s slideshow feature is one of those situations where if you can’t do it as well as existing applications, then don’t do it at all. The transition blows, the music can’t be individually selected, nor can it by synced in any way. You can’t edit the track to make it sync better with your show, etc, etc. Unless, I've missed something again, the slideshow section is a waste of time at this point as far as I’m concerned. It’s also a pig to run. As buggy as ProShow Gold can and has been in my years of using it, it is far superior to the feeble attempt in LR. Adobe should just buy out Photodex, the makers of ProShow if it wants to add real functionality to this section of LR. That’s about it at this point. I’ve not that much time to work with B&W conversions or very many personal files (other than for testing) and the trial version is only good until the end of July, so it’s not likely that I’ll be doing too much more until August when I expect another big editing job coming in, by which point I expect to have my new eight-core box delivered. However, I think it’s a given that I will be purchasing an LR license as another tool once I have the new computer. |
Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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